Steemit is a blogging and social networking website on top of the Steem circle chain database. The Steem blockchain produces Steem and Steem Dollars which are tradeable tokens users obtain for posting, discovering, and commenting on interesting content. Steemit, Inc is a privately held company based in New York City and headquartered in Virginia. The company was founded by Ned Scott and Dan Larimer, creator of BitShares, and EOS.

Concept

The Steemit concept was described in the companies white paper, released in March 2016.[6] The general concept is similar to other blogging websites or social news websites like Reddit, but the text content is saved in a blockchain. Using a blockchain enables rewarding comments and posts with secure tokens of value. Images can be uploaded and hosted on Steemit. Other multimedia content must be embedded from other web hosts. For formatting, there is a WYSIWYG editor. Users can also opt to use Markdown formatting with HTML elements.

User accounts can upvote posts and comments, and the authors who get upvoted can receive a monetary reward in a cryptocurrency token named STEEM and US dollar-pegged tokens called Steem Dollars. People are also rewarded for curating (discovering) popular content. Curating involves voting comments and post submissions. Vote strength and curation rewards are influenced by the amount of STEEM Power held by the voter

Steemit has a reputation system, where new accounts start with a reputation of 25. An account's received votes can influence its reputation up and down, incentivizing online etiquette and interaction with the community.

3rd party applications

Steemit includes third-party applications, such as d.tube a decentralised video platform based on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol. D.tube is similar to YouTube, but without advertisements, instead uses the built-in Steem currency which gets awarded by users upvoting videos.